Sunday was not a great day for the Patriots against the Bills.
In the 33-21 loss, the defense had no answer for Josh Allen and then offensively, it took awhile for things to really get going.
Appearing on The Greg Hill Show Monday morning, Bill Belichick pinpointed the biggest issue in the the game -- third down, both on offense and defense.
“I think there were a lot of things we did well, we just didn’t do them well enough, often enough," he said (listen to entire interview above). "Obviously, the biggest problem in the game was third down. Had we done a better job on third down then things probably would have looked differently. Third and fourth down on defense, a combination of it. We were 1-for-10 on third down on offense. And then 6-for-12 (on defense) and they were 3-for-4 on fourth down. That would have been a big factor in the game had we done that better."
Belichick added: “We had some long-yardage situations. They weren’t all third-and-10’s, but there were some and that was a problem. Just in general, we didn’t do very well on third down. On a couple of them we converted on fourth down, but just overall our third down offensive and defensive execution just wasn’t good enough against a team like Buffalo.”
The loss drops the Patriots to 9-6 on the season and currently the No. 6 seed in the conference. So, while the AFC East may no longer be in their sights, the playoffs still very much are.
"There's still a lot of football left to play," Belichick said. "We'll see how things go here. Hopefully we can play our best football in January. That's what we need to do, and that's what we're planning to do. We're going to work hard and try and do that. As you said, the last couple of weeks have been disappointing, but we’ll turn the page here and move on to Jacksonville this week and the last game and see where things are at that point. There’s still a lot in our control. I think before we write the finale to the season, we’ll see how we finish playing. These are the most important games of the year.”
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